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Yet another mass shooting has shattered lives and sensibilities across the nation. While the dead bodies were still warm and the facts opaque, the usual demagogues began firing off the usual salvo of blame-storming. Guns, or types of guns, or parts of guns, or gun accessories, were to blame. Angry white men. Congress. Gun manufacturers. Republicans. The NRA. You get the idea.

As usual, the only solution to the believers of The Narrative is to ban firearms. Not all firearms, of course (at least not all at once), just the evil ones.

Such people are often impervious to reason. Even so, I feel compelled to once again offer some reasoned, logical thinking on this issue.

Either we have the right to life or we do not. Our Founders believed we do. They enshrined the “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. If we have the right to life, then inherent in that right is the subordinate right to self-defense from any threat, to include the threat of tyrannical government. Our Founders ensured we had the capability to fight any and all such threats by means of the Second Amendment. During the centuries between the ratification of the Constitution and today, Americans have amassed hundreds of millions of firearms and billions, if not trillions of rounds of ammunition.

Since so many guns legally exist in the hands and homes of millions of people who have the protected right to possess them, and since a legal ban on guns could not make all guns everywhere magically evaporate, it follows that the only way we could eliminate all (privately held) guns everywhere in this country would be for well-armed government agents to confiscate them. One small problem. A government that once protected the rights of its people that then abolishes those rights by force is by definition tyrannical!

Therefore: Because guns exist and can be used against the people, the people must have the right to have guns. Put another way: Infringing on the right to keep and bear arms is infringing on the right to life. Banning firearms would be nothing less than banning our right to exist.

You might ask: “What about the victims of these mass shootings? Didn’t they have a right to exist? Doesn’t allowing criminals and crazies access to (insert the detested firearm variety here) give them all the power to kill and destroy?”

Of course the victims had a right to life. Of course we should limit the power of criminals and crazies to kill and destroy. The best way to do that isn’t by eliminating everyone’s access to firearms, it’s by limiting the criminals’ and crazies’ access to society!

It is my contention that people with histories of violence, or diagnoses of psychological conditions making them prone to violent behavior, or those using prescriptions that have side effects that include tendencies toward violence, must be escorted in public, incarcerated, or institutionalized.

“But Mike, criminals and crazies have just as much right to access society as you do!”

No, they don’t. Rights come with the responsibility to respect the rights of others. Those unwilling or incapable of fulfilling such responsibilities have less claim to any rights than those who are responsible. The rights of the incompetent do not outweigh the rights of the competent.

To paraphrase an analogy proffered by Bill Whittle: There are predators and there are prey. The leopard hunts the gazelle with stealth and claw and fang; the gazelle can fight back with numbers, speed, hooves, and horns. We cannot defeat, or even deter, the leopards of the world by erecting “no cat zone” signs (pro-tip: leopards can’t read) and cutting the horns off all the gazelles. However, we might improve the situation by trapping or “belling” the cats!

Oh, one other thing: note that I did not mention the name of the latest mass murderer. Another mitigation we might consider: A significant number of the criminals and crazies out there want nothing more than notoriety. Lets deny it to them. Our media can stop mentioning or publishing the names of the shooters. Yes, doing so is well within the bounds of “newsworthiness” and the names are indeed part of the facts of the case – but why fuel these monsters’ cravings?

I have been accused of being a conservative. I am not, though I could more easily ally with conservatives than with liberals, and I find conservatism less objectionable than liberalism. Here is my take on the tenets of each movement.

Wealth is not created by productive effort; it is magically distributed unfairly and must therefore be redistributed until it reaches some undisclosed ratio to be determined by the (greedy) politicians mentioned above. Similarly, outcomes are not the products of input, but of luck. In order to achieve equality, those with better luck (i.e. more wealth/higher income) must give to those with worse luck until parity is achieved. The “fortunate” are to be penalized for productivity, while the “less fortunate” can, of course, be forgiven for certain criminal activities meant to register their displeasure or to make the transfer (as long as the greedy politicians gets their cut).

Group identity is more important than individual rights – so you can gain synthetic sympathy proportionate to the number aggrieved populations you can “identify” with. For example, if you’re merely female, or of a minority race, you are just a run-of-the-mill potential Progressive. On the other hand, can you identify as a minority, transgendered, homosexual, handicapped, low-income, single-parent, Muslim illegal-immigrant? Hallelujah! Mazel-tov! (But be careful – if you become too unique, then you’re an individual, a pity party of one, and therefore the enemy.)

Free speech only exists for the benefit of fellow Progressives – and includes the power to force everyone else to listen. Publicly-funded broadcast systems are built for this purpose.

The purpose of government is to shape society. The law must be interpreted to reflect the rule of the majority over the minority (especially the minority of one – the individual). To that end, public schooling exists to create a mass of people smart enough to operate machines, but not skilled enough in the arts of critical thinking to question their shepherds. School choice, charter schools, private schools, homeschooling, and merit-based teacher advancement threaten the agenda, so they are to be resisted. Since they do exist, we must spend more on public schools to counter their influence.

Reality is a collective illusion created in the minds of the masses, so morality is pliant and facts don’t matter. We’ll fund science that promotes our agenda, and quash science that does not. If we all wish for and work towards the same Shangri-La hard enough, evil and inequality will go away!

In contrast…

Conservatism is a movement that seeks to preserve (or restore) what it perceives to be the founding principles of the country. To that end, the actions of the conservative movement suggest the following Conservative tenets:

Conservative politicians are “right,” all other politicians are evil.

Wealth is created by productive effort. The most productive among us are “blessed.” The government will help them “give back.”

Individual rights are more important than group identity…unless we are talking about the right to do something immoral, like using illegal intoxicants or engaging in prostitution.

Some free speech that opposes conservative values can be tolerated, but only late at night, or behind a pay-wall, or in a walled-off part of the store, or in special zoning areas…while some publicly-funded places, such as schools and courthouses, are legitimate venues to promote Judeo-Christian values.

That the purpose of government is to shape society, and the law should promote Judeo-Christian morality, not just protect individual rights. To that end, schools must be allowed to promote religious concepts.

Reality was made by God, and the Lord works in mysterious ways. Science is the realm of Progressives/Liberals/Socialists – our political enemies, so it often contradicts Biblical truth and is mostly to be discounted…unless it can be used to refute our leftist colleagues.

Every so often it helps to re-examine one’s goals and purposes. My goal and purpose for this blog is to help others learn to look at the world through the lenses of reason and liberty. Sometimes that means offering dry descriptions of how things are vs how they ought to be, other times it means promoting an independent viewpoint on a hot-button political issue. No doubt I have appeared to be a right-wing radical to someone on the left, while I might seem to be a leftist to the right-winger. To others, it might seem like I’m simply sitting on the fence and refusing to take sides.

I have never claimed to be unbiased. In fact, I have described my bias on more than one occasion, but I haven’t ever really described my full worldview. I thought I might do so now:

It starts with reality. As Ayn Rand said: “Existence exists, and only existence exists.” Carl Sagan said that the cosmos is “all that is, all that was, and all there ever will be.” The evidence that existence exists is axiomatic: If it did not exist, there would be no one to ponder its nature – there would be no nature.

Speaking of nature: Humans are part of nature. Everything humans have ever made, from bone tools and mud huts to spaceships and iPhones, and every action humans have ever taken, from procreating to mass destruction, is ipso-facto natural. That is not to say it is good or bad.

Evil exists. There are good people and bad. Context matters: good people are sometimes capable of bad things, and evil people may sometimes perform a benevolent act. Hitler might have treated a pet well, for instance…but that cannot begin to atone for the fact that he inspired and led the industrialized murder of millions. Because Hitler was human, his actions were natural…but because he failed to credit whole segments of humans with having any humanity, he dehumanized himself. He became a monster of natural, not supernatural origin.

Nor was he the only one. Stalin. Pol Pot. Mao Tse-tung. Saddam Hussein. Every era of history has its brutal dictators and ruthless rulers who don’t hesitate to bathe in the blood of millions. The rational failing of all of these monsters is their inability or refusal to recognize the worth of other humans as humans, or to even recognize other individuals as human at all. They have actualized the ultimate expression of collectivism: the subsuming of the individual human being into a collective. Collectives that can be branded sub-human and disposed of at whim.

Humans have been ruled by such men as could take control of the levers of power since we were clans of hunter-gatherers. Every so often, a breakthrough would occur and the building blocks of civilization were laid, even if technology advanced at much more stately pace. The Mesopotamians or other earliest civilizations gave us agriculture and the division of labor. The Egyptians gave us paper and the concept of a massive library to store the sum of human knowledge. The Greeks gave us the concepts of reasoned philosophical debate, and democratic and republican forms of government, and more. The Arabs gave us Algebra, the concept of zero, and names for many stars we see in the night sky. The Persians or their predecessors gave us Indo-European languages, the wheel, chess (probably by way of India), and more. Largely unbeknownst to the west, the Chinese developed many of these same foundations earlier, or at roughly the same time, as their Western counterparts.

All throughout history, threads bind early developments to later ones. The Greek concepts of democracy and republicanism found a circuitous path that eventually led to the founding fathers and the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights…and the United States of America. An imperfect country, established with imperfect, yet eloquent documents, written by imperfect, yet remarkable men…the first country ever founded on the basis of an ideal: recognition of individual rights, liberty, and the rule of law, protected by a government chartered for that sole purpose. Imperfect though it is, via the combination of the freest form of government, ample natural resources, and the best geographical location, the US rose to become the most dominant economic and military power in the world, and to raise the standard of living for more people than any other nation, empire, or civilization in human history. That much power attracts pathological personalities –both to wield it, and to destroy it. Thus it became inevitable that the US would make enemies. No matter how benevolent the US might be or might have been, our very existence as de-facto world hegemon is a threat to those who aspire to great power, such as Hussein or Osama bin Laden. To wit: something like 9/11 was inevitable.

As beautiful as the founders’ vision of the US was, the implementation of their vision was flawed from the start by four major areas of dysfunction, which I examined in five posts in 2014.

Slavery was chief among those, as it was incompatible with the spirit of the Charters of Freedom. Our earliest Congress partook of the same sin as Hitler, if perhaps to a slightly lesser degree and without the nationalistic zeal: they justified slavery by willfully neglecting to grant the status of “human being” to slaves. It took nearly 3/4 of a century from the founding to end slavery, and nearly 200 years to reverse most of the direct damage of that failure. We are still dealing with the indirect damage to this day.

This is not to say that things can be put right by going the other direction. Dehumanizing and hating whites, especially white, middle class males, cannot free the long-dead slaves of times past, nor can it improve the lot of the descendants of slaves living today. Holding inter-generational grudges leads to incessant conflict – such as that between the Israelis and Palestinians, which is but a proxy for the much older conflict between Arabs and Jews.

How can we overcome the pain of the past without inflicting all new pains now and in the future? More on that next week.

When asked what kind of government our new country has, Benjamin Franklin is widely quoted as stating “a republic, if you can keep it.” Apparently we could not. It’s almost universally accepted these days, to the point of being taught as fact in schools, that we have a democracy. Yet our Constitution outlines a republican form of government with three branches (Executive, Legislative, and Judicial) that functions with some democratic processes. (You can check this for yourself – the word democracy does not appear anywhere in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence).

Unfortunately, we’ve accumulated three additional, unofficial branches of government, and devolved so far from our Founder’s vision that we may no longer have either a republic or a democracy, but an oligarchy (i.e. a form of government where power is held by small group).

What are the three “unofficial” branches that the oligarchs use to wield power? The donor branch, the media branch, and the education branch; all run by the so-called “elites.”

I’ve written before about the “elites” that steer this country, and you’ve probably read or heard others speak of them without really explaining the composition of the group.

Who are the elites in the United States (international elites are another subject)? They are people at the head of the three legitimate branches and the three “shadow” branches of government. In influential order:

The President of the United States: Head of State. Head of Government. Chief Executive Officer of the Executive Branch and Commander in Chief of the military. The incumbent holds possibly the most influential position in the world; certainly whoever occupies the Oval Office wields the most diplomatic influence backed by the most extraordinary military.

The donor class – the folks who provide significant funds to politicians, PACs, and campaigns and are owed favors and quid pro quos. Think George Soros, the Koch brothers, corporate lobbyists, and the like. If we could dig deep enough, we might also find drug lords and other organized crime dons in this class.

The rest of the elected politicians at the Federal level: the 535 members of Congress (the House of Representatives and the Senate), plus the vice president.

Next come political appointees: ambassadors, cabinet secretaries and other cabinet-level executives, federal judges, and military combatant commanders and the Joint Chiefs of Staff – and the emeriti of these positons – e.g. Henry Kissinger.

There is some overlap between the politicians above and the influencers in their networks. These are their fellow Ivy-League and service-academy alumni, corporate and institutional boards, bank chairmen, media moguls, etc.

Perhaps at the bottom rung of the elites are the folks who try to influence us more directly. This group is largely composed of the academic and think-tank intelligentsia and “on-air talent” in the mainstream media.

Perhaps not really elite, but still somewhat culpable for the direction of our country: The entrenched bureaucrats just below the political appointee level. They provide institutional continuity across multiple administrations – and they are largely not accountable. Not because they don’t “report” to anyone, but because it’s so damn hard to fire someone in the Federal government, and because they can just outlast the appointed bosses that can fire them.

Altogether, I estimate that there are perhaps as many as 300,000 to as few as 30,000 people running our country of 300,000,000+ people. What would you call a form of government where perhaps 1/1000th to 1/10,000th of the population holds almost all of the power?

The Desecration of the Independence once valued by the united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for ignorant people to encumber themselves with the chains of political bondage and to abdicate the powers of freedom, liberty, and individuality, in respect to the demands of power-mad politicians and demagogues, requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to their servitude.

We hold these fallacies to be self-evident, that all people must have identical outcomes, that they are given by their betters certain revoke-able Privileges, that among these are the claim to other’s Life, Liberty and Property.–That to secure these rights, Governments are inflicted on people, deriving their powers despite the dissent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes conducive to these ends, it is the Demand of the Ignorant to expand upon them, and to institute more Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Servitude and Misery. Ignorance, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that people are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their desire, to expand such Government, and to provide more Guards for their airport security.–Such has been the dream of these collectivists; and such is now the necessity which compels them to expand their rapacious form of Government. The history of the present government is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations to its original establishment, all having in direct object evolution to an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let the character of the credulous and sycophants and quislings be exposed to a candid world:

Scared of dealing with an opinion you don’t like? Run to your “safe space” and call the whaaambulance. Then get the offending sentiment labeled as “hate speech.”

Can’t be bothered to earn a living for your family? Use SNAP for groceries, then spend your cash on booze, tobacco, tattoos, and “bling.”

Can’t get your mall built without Mrs. Smith’s property? Get city council to condemn it and force her out.

Believe it’s the state’s responsibility to educate your child? Get the government to confiscate your neighbors’ wealth to pay for your kid’s indoctrination…and despise the parent who takes it upon themselves by teaching at home or who pays for private school.

Can’t sell your sculpture of an octopus romancing a bagpipe to your neighbors? make them pay for it anyway by getting government to install your gleaming atrocity.

Can’t make a good product and sell it cheaper than an importer? Get your congressman to impose heavy tariffs.

Can’t offer a service at a better value than the up-and-coming competition? Get your state to set ridiculous training and licensing requirements to make it difficult to enter the market.

Decide it’s too hard to work your way up from entry-level to supervision or management? Demand ridiculous minimum wages.

Unwilling to take responsibility for your own self defense? Work to deny that right to everyone else.

Don’t like your neighbor’s flag? Get the homeowner’s association to ban it.

Don’t think people should ingest substances you don’t approve of? Get government to ban them.

Scared your kids’ faith might be shaken before it’s ingrained? Get the school district to teach “intelligent design” as an alternative theory to evolution.

Can’t abide the idea secular law was influenced by scripture? Get the Ten Commandments banned from public display.

Feel compelled to save your neighbor’s soul, even if he’s not interested? Have the government ban his vices.

Can’t stand the thought that you might be wrong about global warming? Paint your critics as “deniers” (AKA “heretics”) and have them burned at the stake.

Can’t pay for your upside-down mortgage? Is your company “too big to fail?” Get a bailout from Uncle Sugar.

Jealous of the wealth created by someone more inventive or industrious than yourself? Call him greedy and demand your “fair share” of his property.

Don’t think your favorite government program gets enough funding? Install politicians who will tax our earnings, tax our spending, tax our property just sitting there, and steal value from our money through currency devaluation…and still need to borrow more money from our children in order to overpay for it.

In every stage of these Oppressions Individualists have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: such Petitions have been answered only by further descent towards tyranny. A Government whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is fit to be the ruler of an indentured people.

We, therefore, the Masses of the Socialist State of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to Anyone in Authority for the rectitude of our intentions, do, without consent from the good People of this land, solemnly publish and declare, That this Socialist State, and of Might ought to be a dependent State; that they are Commanded to Allegiance to such tyrants that will own them, and that all political connection between them and Independence, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as a Socialist State, they have abdicated their power to the government in order to levy endless War, pretend Peace, contract entangling Alliances, destroy Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which tyrannical powers may of might do. And for the support of this Desecration, with a firm reliance on the protection of capricious enforcers, we mutually pledge to sacrifice the Lives, Fortunes and Honor of our neighbors.

Here’s my take on the bitter firearms dispute vitiating our country. I offer my commentary without vitriol. No contempt. No condescension. No name-calling, baiting, or inflammatory rhetoric; just exposition.

Obviously, we have a fundamental philosophical difference. I don’t know, but I suspect that your apprehension over firearms is energized by a belief that it is the government’s responsibility to protect the citizenry from harm, and that you see firearms in private hands as a huge threat, especially given horrific mass shootings. Ergo, the government should further regulate firearms or ban them outright. If I am articulating it wrong, please correct me.

I can’t speak for every pro-gun rights person, but I suspect most of us subscribe to a quite different interpretation of the government’s duty to protect us than you do. I see it like this: All of us have the inherent right to defend ourselves from immediate violence. It would be nice if there were always a police officer around to intercede on our behalf, but that’s just not feasible, so we compromise. We retain the ultimate individual right to self-defense, but we delegate the right to retaliate after the fact (via impartial criminal prosecution and punishment) to government.

So far, you may not see a large gulf between our positions. Yet there is a significant one: It is my position that the right to self-defense is absolute. By that I mean that I have the right to defend myself from ANY initiation of violence (or the imminent threat of same) from ANY initiator – up to and including government agents, should they act in the absence of due process or turn overtly tyrannical. A shotgun or revolver is hardly proportional to such a threat. Since our own government, should it turn tyrannical, and the forces of other governments, should they unwisely choose to invade this country, possess weapon systems of devastating destructive power, it is more than reasonable for a free individual to possess mere firearms to stand in opposition, even if such opposition must take the form of a covert insurgency. It is reasonable that a free person possess firearms identically lethal to those his oppressors routinely bear.

Does that mean I think private individuals should be able to go down to “Booms-R-Us” and buy guided missiles and tanks and chemical weapons? In the absence of a better argument, I’ll accede to this principle: the more indiscriminate a weapon is, the harder it should be for anyone to obtain. That principle is already largely in effect. Regardless of anybody’s desire, there is no “Booms-R-Us” to go to in this country. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t legally buy a grenade, landmine, or bomb as a private citizen without an enormous amount of oversight, if at all. Conversely, hand-held firearms currently legal for possession are discriminate enough that law-abiding individuals should not be further barred or banned from buying and possessing them, regardless of militarized appearance, magazine capacity, fire rate, trigger function, or other minutiae, or whether some sociopath or jihadist has used one to commit mass murder.

There has been, and will continue to be, all manner of legal wrangling over the exact meaning of the oddly-phrased Second Amendment within the bounds of “the letter of the law.” However, the Founders made the spirit and intent clear in their other writings. The Second Amendment does not primarily protect the right to hunt or compete at the skeet range, that protection is a byproduct. It protects the individual right to self-defense. (Don’t take my word for it; the Supreme Court has said as much in D.C. vs. Heller.) A populace that can assassinate tyrannical leaders and their henchmen and fight a well-equipped guerrilla war against its oppressors is a populace that will not be easy to subjugate. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to guarantee that America has such a populace.

If we look at our positions from a purely logical standpoint, I posit that we are arguing from different premises: The pro-gun rights argument rests on the premise that individuals have an inherent and inviolate right to self-defense, and that our government is obligated by the Second Amendment to protect that right through non-infringement on keeping and bearing arms. If I have not misread the argument for the gun control faction, your premise is that government’s obligation to protect our rights gives it (or should give it) the purview to limit the potential for anyone to cause harm.

I contend that the more power you give to the government to prevent anyone from causing harm, the more pathological personalities you will attract who seek to wield that power…to cause harm! Eventually, you will get a card-carrying totalitarian who will turn the United States into a Venezuela or an Iraq, or worse. The alternative is to accept some risk with your freedom: occasionally, a nut with a rifle will kill a bunch of innocent people. The proper mitigation to both threats: A populace that can shoot back!

Last week, I offered the view that adopting socialism is a recipe for disaster. Most of the political “-isms” (socialism, communism, fascism, imperialism, etc.) “-chies” and “-cracies” (monarchy, anarchy, theocracy, democracy, plutocracy, oligarchy, etc.) sound different on paper, but they all have two things in common: the rule of one human or few humans over the rest, and the absence of individual freedom.

There is an alternative. Our founders gave us a Constitutional republic which enshrined the rule of law and individual liberty. The essential element of freedom is property rights, including self-ownership. The political-economic system that arises where freedom reigns is called capitalism. It has never been fully embraced by any country. Our own country perhaps came the closest, which greatly contributed to the vast economic achievements and ever-increasing prosperity we came to expect as Americans.

Yet our failure to fully adopt it has had a profound effect on our history. The institution of slavery was a direct affront to the concept of freedom, and it convulsed our country from its beginnings through the Civil War and beyond. I’ve written elsewhere of slavery and unjust war as two of the four major dysfunctions that have afflicted our country.

Want some examples of how capitalism is better than socialism?

The Ukraine is a geographic bread basket, similar in productive potential to the US Midwest; yet the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (of which Ukraine was once one of the socialist republics) had to import grain from us during the height of the cold war. Why couldn’t they produce and distribute enough to feed themselves?

Virtually every labor saving and communications device and other technological advancement since the Dark Ages was invented or perfected in the US or another semi-capitalistic country. (E.g. the electric light bulb, the car, the airplane, the microwave oven, the TV, VCR, and DVD, the laser, vaccines, etc.). Have you ever considered buying a car designed and manufactured by an Iranian or North Korean company? Does such a thing even exist? Why aren’t such things invented in dictatorships and socialist utopias?

In most cases, landlocked nations are doomed to economic mediocrity or worse. (Examples: Afghanistan, Mongolia, and Bolivia). But a few, such as Switzerland and Lichtenstein, are incredibly well off. What separates them? The ones that are well off have a much higher degree of individual freedom and capitalism than the others.

China was once every bit the communist leviathan that the Soviet Union was. Why didn’t China go the same way the USSR did? Conversely, why is the US going through a decline?

China is ascending to the same degree it has adopted limited capitalistic market reforms. Our country is declining to the same degree we adopt the socialist dysfunctions that destroyed the Soviets and continues to hamper the Chinese. Imagine the productive energy that could be unleashed if 1.4 billion people enjoyed a fully free existence!

Despite the vast body of historical evidence that capitalism works and socialism doesn’t, capitalism has been given a bad name. Individual freedom requires individual responsibility for one’s own actions and living with the consequences of one’s choices. For that reason, capitalism will always be a hard sell compared to the free goodies and cradle-to-grave care promised by the heralds of the other “-isms.” On top of that, where capitalism has some influence, prosperity follows. Prosperous people are easy for envy-baiters to blame in order to gain an audience…and power. In virtually every human system of organization other than capitalism, anyone with wealth could only attain it by taking a bigger share of “the pie” than everyone else. Capitalism is unprecedented – it allows the productive to enlarge the pie! But the envy mongers can’t or won’t see that. They say capitalism fosters greed. There’s no denying that greedy people exist, and some of them advance quite far under semi-capitalistic economies, but socialism is absolutely powered by greed and envy!

It is easy for the prophets of utopia to blame capitalism for the sins of the other systems. The latest example is the appellation “crony” capitalism. The proper term for companies using influence, connections, and campaign donations to get laws passed that stifle their competition is “corporatism.” Using the coercive power of government to stifle your competition when you can’t win competitively through offering better value is not capitalism at all, though it has some capitalistic trappings (namely the privately-owned nature of the corporation).

The really ironic thing about the other “-isms?” They need the productivity of capitalism. A greedy socialist can’t “redistribute” wealth from the productive to the parasitic if there isn’t any wealth to start with. He must decry capitalism even as he robs the capitalistic in order to buy votes from those he has bamboozled.